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BFI

BFI is not a Tomatometer-approved publication. Reviews from this publication only count toward the Tomatometer® when written by the following Tomatometer-approved critic(s): Gayle Sequeira, Joseph Fahim, Rafa Sales Ross, Steph Green, Whelan Barzey.

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Rating Title | Year Author Quote
The Voice of Hind Rajab (2025) Joseph Fahim The film’s unmodulated use of the child’s calls leaves space only for enforced sympathy rather than reflective distance. The aestheticisation of actual events through such a synthetic narrative ultimately denies Hind individuality.
Posted Jan 16, 2026  Edit critic review
The Fountain (2006) Gayle Sequeira The limitations of the body, its susceptibility to disease and death, have never been more keenly felt in Aronofsky’s works.
Posted Aug 27, 2025  Edit critic review
Requiem for a Dream (2000) Gayle Sequeira Ghostly dissolves capture them turning into mere echoes of themselves. Aronofsky speeds up time and draws it out agonisingly, evoking the rush of the high and then its crushing absence.
Posted Aug 27, 2025  Edit critic review
The Wrestler (2008) Gayle Sequeira Aronofsky makes movies about people who suffer for their art, but in The Wrestler, suffering is the art, the spectacle that people are so drawn to. A distillation of his most enduring themes, it still foregoes his more disorienting visual tricks.
Posted Aug 27, 2025  Edit critic review
Black Swan (2010) Gayle Sequeira Doubles, mirror images and unnerving doppelgängers dot this tale of a repressed, rigid ballerina (Natalie Portman), whose artistic director pushes her to lose herself in her art during a production of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. Instead, she loses her head.
Posted Aug 27, 2025  Edit critic review
Hysteria (2025) Joseph Fahim Hysteria is superlative political entertainment: a bold, intelligent picture that explores the complex and often contradictory relationship of second-generation Germans to their Islamic heritage, class privilege, the moral price of artistic integrity.
Posted Aug 16, 2025  Edit critic review
Dreams (2024) Joseph Fahim Storytelling may have aided Johanne’s healing; it may have given her a powerful tool for self-affirmation, for reclaiming the narrative Johanna has never and may never acknowledge, but it couldn’t grant her closure.
Posted Aug 16, 2025  Edit critic review
Pathaan (2023) Gayle Sequeira Pathaan sums up Shak Rukh Khan’s triumphant comeback in just two words: “Zinda hai (Still alive).” No amount of CGI-enhanced spectacle can match the sheer delight of watching real star power in action.
Posted Nov 17, 2024  Edit critic review
Tenet (2020) Gayle Sequeira Orson Welles’ assertion that a movie in production is the biggest train set a boy could have is routinely borne out by Christopher Nolan films, in which planes are wrecked with giddy glee.
Posted Nov 17, 2024  Edit critic review
Mission: Impossible - Fallout (2018) Gayle Sequeira By 2018, a franchise that began with Tom Cruise dangling from the ceiling of a Langley vault was dangling him off a 1,981-foot-high cliff, illustrating how Mission Impossible’s stunts have only gotten bigger, bolder and more bonkers.
Posted Nov 17, 2024  Edit critic review
Grindhouse Presents: Death Proof (2007) Gayle Sequeira The two halves of Death Proof each conclude with a superb car sequence: one a crash, the other a chase; one at night, the other at daytime; one sickening, the other supremely satisfying.
Posted Nov 17, 2024  Edit critic review
Face/Off (1997) Gayle Sequeira In John Woo’s Face/Off, the unhinged intensity of the actors’ performances and outlandish absurdity of its plot is matched only by the relentless excess of its action.
Posted Nov 17, 2024  Edit critic review
Sholay (1975) Gayle Sequeira The film's most celebrated action sequence is as propulsive as the train it’s set on, as one outlaw shovels coal into the locomotive furnace to speed it up, while another picks off converging bandits. But its most indelible scenes draw out time instead.
Posted Nov 17, 2024  Edit critic review
The Most Dangerous Game (1932) Gayle Sequeira One stretch cuts between the actor's eyes and his point-of-view in tight close-up as he doggedly stalks his prey through the jungle, vision obscured by dense foliage. In another, the camera keeps pace alongside a pack of ferocious hunting dogs.
Posted Nov 17, 2024  Edit critic review
The Bloodhound (2020) Gayle Sequeira Director Patrick Picard hones in on the isolation at the heart of Edgar Allan Poe’s story.
Posted Mar 04, 2024  Edit critic review
Two Evil Eyes (1990) Gayle Sequeira Two masterful horror directors spin Poe’s tales into an anthology of contemporary narratives that center men attempting to get away with murder.
Posted Mar 04, 2024  Edit critic review
Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key (1972) Gayle Sequeira Death and desire are inextricable in this clever reworking of Poe’s short story, which trades the first-person POV of a man ruing the growing blight upon his soul for a slasher thriller in which the identity of the perpetrator initially remains a mystery.
Posted Mar 04, 2024  Edit critic review
The Masque of the Red Death (1964) Gayle Sequeira For all its elaborate, theatrical staging and grand declarations, however, the film doesn’t lean into camp despite lines such as, “This is your day of deliverance, remember?” The result is more akin to that of Shakespearean tragedy.
Posted Mar 04, 2024  Edit critic review
The Pit and the Pendulum (1961) Gayle Sequeira The sickening dread this film builds up during a climactic sequence is eventually subverted, but The Pit and the Pendulum still conjures up one last stomach-sinking image to sear into memory before it ends.
Posted Mar 04, 2024  Edit critic review
The Tell-Tale Heart (1953) Gayle Sequeira Ted Parmelee’s Oscar-nominated short is just eight minutes long, but those are enough – the sensation of the walls closing in lingers long after.
Posted Mar 04, 2024  Edit critic review
The Fall of the House of Usher (1928) Gayle Sequeira Adapting a story that hinges on the protagonist’s acute sound sensitivity into a silent film is tricky, but Jean Epstein’s work endures on the strength of its images alone.
Posted Mar 04, 2024  Edit critic review
The Avenging Conscience (1914) Gayle Sequeira Its ending is bound to be fiercely divisive, but the silent film remains strikingly original for how it extends to its protagonist what so many in Edgar Allan Poe’s stories are denied: redemption.
Posted Mar 04, 2024  Edit critic review
Air Doll (2009) Gayle Sequeira Air Doll, directed by Hirokazu Koreeda and based on the manga Kuuki Ningyo, captures the loneliness of city life, in which dinners for one are routine and employees are replaceable.
Posted Jul 29, 2023  Edit critic review
Lars and the Real Girl (2007) Gayle Sequeira Lars and the Real Girl is a tragicomic examination of male loneliness.
Posted Jul 29, 2023  Edit critic review
Toy Story (1995) Gayle Sequeira Children must eventually outgrow their toys and it’s this existential fear that informs the animated film. Even as its characters worry about getting left behind, the movie is a perfectly preserved snapshot of childhood, a time gone by.
Posted Jul 29, 2023  Edit critic review
Pin (1988) Gayle Sequeira This Sandor Stern horror film begins by examining the dysfunction of the nuclear family unit, gradually morphing into the unnerving story of not just the things we’d sacrifice for family, but the things we’d sacrifice family for.
Posted Jul 29, 2023  Edit critic review
Child's Play (1988) Gayle Sequeira There’s not much subtlety to a slasher film in which the opening stretch sees a dying serial killer transfer his spirit into a doll, but snuck into Child’s Play is an effective commentary on capitalism and consumer excess.
Posted Jul 29, 2023  Edit critic review
Suddenly in the Dark (1981) Gayle Sequeira This absorbing Korean thriller adopts a kaleidoscopic effect when a wife sees, or imagines seeing, her husband and housemaid intertwined, representing the distortion of her perception.
Posted Jul 29, 2023  Edit critic review
Magic (1978) Gayle Sequeira This Richard Attenborough film is less scary than it is sad, about a mentally ill man wrestling with his inner demons and finding them no easier to control when they’re in tangible form.
Posted Jul 29, 2023  Edit critic review
The Doll (1962) Gayle Sequeira Director Arne Mattsson adopts an empathetic view of mental illness in a society utterly ill-equipped to handle it.
Posted Jul 29, 2023  Edit critic review
The Doll (1919) Gayle Sequeira The childlike framing complements the protagonist’s eschewing of adult responsibilities.
Posted Jul 29, 2023  Edit critic review
3/5
(undefined) Steph Green But for all its beauty and sexual slipperiness, the film trips itself up with juvenile plot developments ripped from a romance paperback.
Posted Feb 22, 2023  Edit critic review
4/5
Other People's Children (2022) Steph Green Rather than generalising about childless women, this is a sensitively felt and deceptively nuanced exploration of one woman’s experience with motherhood.
Posted Nov 30, 2022  Edit critic review
Fabian: Going to the Dogs (2021) Jordan Cronk Known primarily as a genre director, Graf applies his flair for dynamic storytelling and dazzling set pieces to Kästner’s uniquely autobiographical, character-driven novel.
Posted Feb 11, 2022  Edit critic review
Dark River (2017) Nikki Baughan For Alice, taming the land means overcoming her demons and, in the hands of Barnard and Wilson, her battle is ultimately as rewarding as it is devastating.
Posted Nov 23, 2021  Edit critic review
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